Fichte (Adamson)/Chapter VI
CHAPTER VI.
“WISSENSCHAFTSLEHRE” IN ITS EARLIER FORM.
The general aim or spirit of the Wissenschaftslehre having been determined, it becomes necessary to consider more particularly the nature of the problems presenting themselves for solution, and the method by which they are to be treated. As regards both points, the most valuable writings are the two “Introductions to Wissenschaftslehre,” and the “Sonnenklarer Bericht.”[1]
1.—Dogmatism and Idealism.
The slightest reflection discloses to us the remarkable distinction in consciousness between two orders of representations[2] or phenomena, which we call, with some vagueness, inner and outer experience. With more precision, we should say that, while some phenomena of consciousness present themselves as evidently the products of free mental activity, others appear in an order independent of us, and are characterised for us by the accompanying “feeling” of necessity which attaches to them. Now, the problem of philosophy—i.e., of Wissenschaftslehre—is to explain experience, to render it intelligible; and all explanation consists in rendering a reason for the phenomena to be explained. The ground of experience, in the highest sense, is not to be sought beyond experience itself, but our reflection upon experience does undoubtedly proceed beyond it, since it regards the whole as matter to be accounted for. This procedure beyond experience is, in fact, the process familiarly known as abstraction. Philosophical theory, having presented to it the complex fact of the coexistence of inner and outer experience, abstracts from the condition of coexistence, and selects for isolated consideration, on the one hand, the Ego or conscious subject, on the other hand, the non-Ego or object simply. Whether such abstraction is a legitimate process may remain meanwhile undetermined,—the analysis of the problem itself will throw light upon the nature of the thoughts involved in it,—but by its means we reach the fundamental opposition of philosophical systems. Ego and non-Ego, subject and object, thought and being, are separate grounds, to which the whole of experience may be referred for explanation. Do we explain experience as the product of the non-Ego, we have the system which may be called Dogmatism; do we explain the whole as springing from the Ego, we have Idealism. Of the one, the typical example is the system of Spinoza, in which the order and connection of thoughts are explained by reference to that which does not contain in itself the element of self-consciousness,—where, therefore, the Ego appears as a mechanically determined unit in the sum total of things. Of the other, a representative may probably be found in Leibnitz, though much of the later Kantian speculation is only intelligible as a kind of half-understood idealism.[3]
Which of these counter-principles has right on its side? Does either satisfy the requirements of philosophical explanation? It is evident, on the one hand, that the dogmatic method, if true to itself, must, in the end, have resort to an absolutely unknown and unknowable thing as the non-Ego. The thing-in-itself is, in fact, the solution offered by dogmatism; and such solution is defective in two ways. In the first place, while for a supposed external observer the existence of a non-Ego might furnish explanation of what presents itself in the consciousness of the subject—that is to say, of the limitation of the subject—no such explanation is possible for the subject himself. That he should be limited may possibly result from the existence of a non-Ego; that he should know himself as limited cannot be explained from the existence of the non-Ego simply. In the second place, the assumed non-Ego is for the thinking subject non-existent: no possible predicate can, by the subject, be attached to it which does not imply reference to the subject, and therefore relative, dependent existence.
The non-Ego, as such, as thing-in-itself, is not in consciousness, and is, for the Ego, nothing.
Dogmatism thus furnishes no explanation. The opposed principle, that of idealism pure and simple, has at least one superiority: it selects, as ground of explanation, what is unquestionably in consciousness. The Ego, or subject, is known to be. But when the Ego, or subject, is taken per se, and the attempt is made to deduce from it the multiplicity of experience, we find a hiatus which is absolutely impassable, unless our method is at once guarded and comprehensive. An imperfect or half-understood idealism regards the Ego as merely subject, and is thus driven to the conception of self-consciousness as somehow one of the facts discoverable in intelligence. In this case, while it may be possible to explain that the Ego should know itself as limited, it is quite impossible to explain how it should know itself as limited by the non-Ego. As Fichte rightly puts it, “In vain shall we look for a link of connection between subject and object, if they are not first and simply apprehended as a unity. . . . The Ego is not to be regarded as subject merely, but as at once subject and object.”[4]
If we translate Fichte’s reasoning regarding idealism into other terms, it might be expressed thus. Idealist speculation has sought the ground of explanation in consciousness,—in that which is immediately and directly known to us. But in so doing, it has followed the same method which, when dealing with the thing-in-itself, gave rise to dogmatism. It has regarded consciousness as merely so much to be known,—as a series of states, Vorstellungen, from which nothing can possibly be extracted. It has not considered how consciousness comes to be, what conditions are necessarily implied in its existence, what are the laws under which it acts. Thus idealism drifts easily into a kind of psychological doctrine (as in Schmid, and later in Fries), or results in a sceptical phenomenalism (as in Maimon and in Hume).[5] Only one idealist system has really gone to the heart of the problem, and fairly considered how it is that, in consciousness, there appears the opposition between Ego and non-Ego; for only one philosophy has seized the principle that consciousness or intelligence as a whole is conditioned by self-consciousness, and that the laws under which self-consciousness are realised are at once the form and matter of intelligence. This is the critical or transcendental idealism of Kant,—a system imperfect in details, easily misunderstood, and requiring to be remodelled or restated before it can be made to yield adequate solution of the speculative problem.
Thus for Fichte there are historically but two reasoned systems of philosophy—that of Spinoza and that of Kant. The one is dogmatic,—that is, it neglects to give due weight to the principle of self-consciousness, and hence endeavours to explain existence by a notion which is limited, and applicable only within the experience of a self-conscious subject. The other is critical,—that is, it recognises the great truth that all consciousness is determined by self-consciousness, and so acknowledges the due limits of thought. If we were to express in a single word the characteristic feature of Fichte’s system, we should describe it as “Spinoza in terms of Kant.” That which was wanting in the critical philosophy, systematic development, is predominant in Spinoza; and, as will be seen, the theoretical part of the Wissenschaftslehre is nothing but an inverted or idealistic Spinozism. It has often been said that the influence of Spinoza over the course of Fichte’s speculation became more significant in the second period of his literary activity; but even were this the case, one must not forget that in the earliest expositions of Wissenschaftslehre, comparison with Spinoza, and recognition of similarity with his thoughts, appear throughout. To understand the substance of Fichte’s speculation, some note must be taken of these historical antecedents.
2.—Historical antecedents: Spinoza and Kant.
To any one acquainted with Spinoza’s system, Fichte’s description of it as essentially “dogmatic” must at first appear erroneous; for by a dogmatic system Fichte understands one which deduces the order of conscious experience from a supposed order of things,—and it needs but slight knowledge of Spinoza to be aware that for him any implied contrast or relation between the order of ideas and the order of things has no place. It is necessary, however, to pass beyond the mere verbal definition of dogmatism on the one hand, and the mere statement of Spinoza’s opinion on the other, if we are to discuss fairly the relation between them. That which characterises dogmatism as a philosophical method is not simply the distinction between ideas and things, but the nature of the notion or category by means of which either ideas or things are made comprehensible. In all cases of explanation, we find, as the residuum of analysis, some fundamental relation or thought by means of which the facts involved have become for us intelligible. Thus the notion or relation of cause is involved in all explanations of physical change, and itself requires to be critically analysed in order that we may see what assumptions or underlying notions are implied in it. Now the notion which dogmatism applies to explanation of experience is briefly that of mutual determination,—what Kant called the category of Reciprocity. Each thing, or part of real experience, has its definite character by and through its relations to all other things. It is determined to be what it is, by virtue of the determinations of other things. A notion or category of this kind is evidently highly complex; and, indeed, as one might conjecture, it may be applied with much variety of signification. It may remain a purely mechanical category, implying only external relations of the things which compose a collective or aggregate whole; or it may be elevated so as to become the idea of a systematic whole, in which the relations of the parts are not mechanical.[6] The first significance, however, is that which characterises the use of the notion in the dogmatic method. For here things and ideas are regarded as alike in one respect, as being alike finite objects of possible cognition. Each external thing, each idea, is finite in its kind—i.e., is capable of being limited, determined by another. Through this limitation by others, each has its definite being. It matters not, then, whether we regard things and ideas as composing two orders, of which one is cause, the other effect, or assert that things and ideas are both the same, looked at from different points of view; in either case we subject the facts to the same mode of explanation, regard each as a unit, marked off from others, and with only external relations to them, and explain the special characteristics of each as depending on the coexistence of all the others.
Now this notion of reciprocity or mutual determination is fundamental in Spinoza, and is that by which his system has gained its greatest influence over modern thought. It is true that it is not the only notion used by Spinoza,—in fact, the difficulties, even incomprehensibilities, of his metaphysics arise mainly from the conjunction of the notion of mutual determination with that of substance, but it is a thought which is involved in scientific procedure as such, and through it Spinoza has been brought into the closest relations with modern scientific work. The phrases, more or less commonplace, by which the systematic unity of things is expressed,—such as, the order and uniformity of nature, the prevalence of law,—are merely expressions of what is contained in this notion of reciprocity. It is evident, further, that if we apply this notion to the explanation of experience, we must regard self-consciousness, the essence of the thinking subject, as merely one phenomenon, or state, or thing, determined by relations to other phenomena, and assume that these relations are of an external kind. Thus, for Spinoza, the peculiarity of self-consciousness vanishes; and even if we interpret liberally the obscure propositions (‘Ethics,’ ii. Props. 21 et seq.) in which the Idea Mentis is treated, it is evident that self-consciousness, as understood by him, is referred to that which lies outside of it and therefore mechanically determines it.
Fichte’s criticism of this dogmatic method is in form and spirit identical with the later and more famous expression of Hegel. He has to point out that Spinoza omits altogether criticism of the notion of mutual determination—that is to say, omits to examine the nature and validity of the notion for our thinking. Had such criticism been undertaken, it would have become apparent that a category like reciprocity is entirely inadequate to express the relation of self-consciousness and the experience to which it is related; that substance and mode, Spinoza’s supreme forms, are limited in their nature; and that there is no philosophic ground for procedure beyond self-consciousness. While signalising these faults, Fichte nevertheless recognises the high ideal of speculation which is disclosed in Spinoza’s ‘Ethics,’ and draws largely on the Spinozistic method. Many of his fundamental principles, both in the earlier and the later periods of his thinking, are in form and matter identical with those of the ‘Ethics.’ There is no sufficient ground for asserting, as many writers have done, that the influence of Spinoza over Fichte increased, and that in the final period of the latter’s philosophising his exposition is merely a mystical Spinozism. No closer connection is possible than that between the theoretical portion of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ and the principles of Spinoza. The later works accentuate somewhat the religious aspect of the theory of knowledge, but imply no other theory; and however close in forms of expression the religious doctrines of the two thinkers may be, the radical opposition in their point of view is not to be forgotten.
This radical opposition in point of view was the natural and inevitable consequence of the critical philosophy. To understand the specific problems presented to Fichte, it is necessary to note with some care what the Kantian system had completed, and what it had left undone.
To Kant the problem of philosophy in general had presented itself under special aspects determined by historical circumstances,—in the main, however, under the aspect of a question as to the possibility of knowledge. This question he for the first time proposed to treat in its wider issues, as independent of psychology and of metaphysical assumptions. Beyond all doubt it was not given to Kant,—it is given to no thinker,—to free himself entirely from the notions and phraseology current at the time; and so it has come about that the ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’ the work in which the dogmatic method of English philosophy and of Leibnitz was first subjected to examination, shows in many of its main doctrines unmistakable traces of the method against which it was directed. Thus, while Kant is making clear, on the one hand, that knowledge, for the self-conscious subject, cannot be explained by reference to a world of things thought as out of connection with self-consciousness, he still allows himself ambiguities of speech which might be interpreted to mean that the special content of knowledge, the matter, is explicable by reference to such things; and while he makes clear, on the other hand, that the conception of a mere stream of conscious states, as the phenomena of an individual subject, is in itself contradictory and absurd, he yet draws distinctions which might be taken to imply that the difference of subjective and objective in knowledge is one of kind, and not a subordinate form to be explained under the more comprehensive synthesis with which he started.
If, then, it be considered what was for Kant the fundamental principle of philosophical method, and how far the actual results of his system correspond with the requirements of the method, a summary view of the problems left for solution to the post-Kantian writers may readily be obtained. Now the fundamental principle, disguised under many strange fashions of speech in the ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’ is that already described as the principle of self-consciousness. All knowledge, all experience, is only for a self-conscious subject. Such a subject is not to be regarded as an individual, for the notion of individuality implies relations of a complex and quite distinct kind. It is the common element in all consciousness, that by which consciousness is what it is. If, therefore, the explanation of experience be proposed as the problem of philosophy, the method of procedure may be either an investigation of the idea of self-consciousness, the determination of the conditions under which it is possible, and the evolution in strict sequence of the elements which are embraced in it; or by an analysis of knowledge, of experience, as it presents itself in ordinary, empirical consciousness, and the determination of the features in it due to the presence of this central unity. The second method was that adopted by Kant, and the result has been somewhat unfortunate. For, in consequence of the method adopted, the several elements composing knowledge were discussed in isolation from one another and from their central unity, and were thus, almost of necessity, viewed not as elements in a synthesis, which have no existence save in and through their combination, but as independent parts of an integral or collective whole. Thus, in the ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’ the problem is stated in an ambiguous and confusing way; and in the ‘Æsthetik,’ more particularly, the central point of view is lost sight of in a quite subordinate issue. Knowledge, Kant sees clearly enough, is possible only as a synthetic combination in the unity of self-consciousness. The conditions or forms of such combination determine experience, or give general laws to it, but such determination is merely formal. Nothing can be presented in self-consciousness which contradicts or is out of harmony with these conditions, but the specific determination of this matter of knowledge is not to be deduced from the conditions themselves. Upon this view of the purely formal or logical function of the unity of thought rest the Kantian distinctions of the a priori and a posteriori elements in cognition, of form and matter, of sense and understanding, of empirical and transcendent reality, of phenomena and noumena. So far, then, as theory of knowledge goes, Kant, while bringing into the foreground the very first principle of cognition, fails to connect therewith the subordinate forms. Space and Time are shown, on special grounds, not to be explicable by reference to external things or to states of subjective experience, but they are placed in no intimate relation to the unity of self-consciousness. The conscious subject is receptive, and, if receptive, only under the pure forms of space and time. But how or why a self-conscious subject should appear to itself receptive; how or why, if receptive, it should be so in the forms of space and time,—are questions entirely unresolved. So when Kant undertakes the discussion of the key-stone to his position, the deduction of the categories or exposition of the forms of combination which make up the nature of the thinking subject, his procedure is equally external and haphazard. It is certainly shown that categories are implied in self-consciousness, but how or why they should be so implied—how or why there should be so many of them and no more—how they are connected with one another and form a system in human knowledge,—these questions, likewise, are left unsolved. Further, when the categories, having been deduced as the forms of the activity of the synthetic Ego, are brought into relation with the forms of receptivity, the results, though rich in consequences, leave much to be desired. The fusion into the unity of knowledge is a merely mechanical one. Categories as modes of understanding, schemata as modes of productive imagination, data of sense as modes of affection, are linked together, and appear to have a nature and existence independently of one another, and of the synthesis in which they are combined. The final result—the world of sense-experience determined throughout by intelligence, but in itself an empirically endless series of finite, limited objects—is not one which can satisfy the demand for unity of cognition. The constant striving to transcend the limits of this world of experience, to reach the final synthesis in which its relation to self-consciousness shall be deduced, is what Kant calls Reason. So far as cognition is concerned, the one result of reason is the empty notion of the thing in itself,—a notion which, unfortunately, was by Kant so expressed, and by the Kantians so understood, as to imply much of the old dogmatic theory which it had been the business of the ‘Critique’ to explode. Kant, however, is not to be credited with all that has been drawn from his speculations by writers who had never grasped his fundamental principle. For him, the thing in itself, the expression of the infinite striving of self-consciousness, is discoverable only in self-consciousness, as its absolute law. The statement of this absolute law is certainly approached by Kant from the empirical point of view or by an analytic method, and the position assigned by him to the categorical imperative seems at first sight to sunder Reason entirely from the world of experience. Nothing, indeed, can make the Kantian moral theory perfectly coherent; but, with especial reference to Fichte and the later German philosophy, it must be stated with perhaps unnecessary definiteness, that only in the categorical imperative does the notion of the thing-in-itself hold any position as a reality in the Kantian metaphysics.[7] The final synthesis, so far as it was attempted by Kant, appears only in the ‘Critique of Judgment,’ in which, by means of the notion of End, a reconciliation is sought between the intelligible or moral world, the realm of things-in-themselves, and the world of experience, of phenomena. The ethical idealism with which the Kantian theory closes, comes nearer to the Fichtian position than can be made apparent without more lengthy analysis of Kant than is here possible; but even in it we find the same tendency to separation which is the harassing feature of all the Kantian work. Fichte, it must be held, was justified in his constant complaint that in Kant there were really three theories which are never amalgamated. “Kant,” he remarks in an instructive passage in the ‘Nachgelassene Werke,’ “had three absolutes . . . In the ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’ sense-experience was for him the absolute ( = x); and in regard to the ideas, the higher, intelligible world, he expressed himself in a most depreciatory fashion. From his earlier works, and from hints in the ‘Critique’ itself, it may certainly be inferred that he would not have halted at that position; but I will engage to show that these hints are mere inconsequences of reasoning, for if his principles were consistently followed out, the supersensible world must vanish entirely, and as the only noumenon there would remain that which is to be realised in experience . . . The loftier moral nature of the man corrected his philosophical error, and so appeared the ‘Critique of Practical Reason.’ In it was manifested the categorical notion of the Ego as something in itself, which could never have appeared in the ‘Critique of Pure Reason;’ we have thus a second absolute, a moral world ( = z). But all the phenomena of human nature were not thereby explained. The relations of the beautiful, of the sublime, and of end in nature, which palpably were neither theoretical nor moral notions, yet remained. Moreover, what is of much greater importance, the empirical world was now absorbed in the moral world, as a world in itself,—a just retribution, as it were, for the first victory of the empirical There appeared, then, the ‘Critique of Judgment,’ in the introduction to which the most remarkable portion of that remarkable work it was acknowledged that the supersensible and the sensible worlds must have some common though undiscoverable root, which root is the third absolute ( = y). I say a third, separate from the two preceding and independent, although giving unity to them; and in this I do Kant no wrong, For if this y is undiscoverable, it may contain the other two; but we cannot comprehend how it does so, or deduce them from it. If, on the other hand, it is to be comprehended, it must be comprehended as absolute; and there remain, as before, three absolutes.”[8]
The Kantian philosophy, while definitely formulating the first principle of speculation, thus left unsolved a whole series of problems, all of them arising in connection with one line of thought, and furnishing the material for later efforts at systematic development of the principle from which it started. With more or less clearness the thinkers who immediately followed Kant undertook the solution of these problems, and their work to a large extent determined the character of the Fichtean system, and was incorporated into it Thus Reinhold’s constant demand for unity of principle is recognised by Fichte as an attempt in the right direction, though the principle selected by him, that of representation (Vorstellung) as the fundamental fact of consciousness, was incapable of yielding any result more satisfactory than had been presented in the Kantian philosophy. Reinhold evidently felt the difficulty of bringing subject and object into any connection whatsoever, if they were assumed as originally distinct. He therefore proposed to select as starting-point the existence of the conscious state or representation, in which subject and object are contained as factors, and endeavoured by analysis of this fact to deduce the several doctrines which in a less coherent form had been brought forward by Kant. But in the first place, as Fichte points out in the ‘Review of Ænesidemus,’[9] the primary datum of philosophical construction cannot be a fact or representation, but must be the simple and original activity by which the fact or representation comes to be; and in the second place, as had been made quite apparent by the sceptical criticism of ‘Ænesidemus’ (Schulze), the idea of Vorstellung involved that doctrine which above all others was a stumbling-block to the Kantians,—the doctrine that the matter or definite content of Vorstellung was determined ab extra, by things-in-themselves. So, too, Beck’s acute restatement of the Kantian theory had brought into the clearest light the gross misconceptions which might readily arise from Kant’s mode of stating his doctrines. To many of the Kantians, indeed, the theory of the a priori character of the forms of perception and thought had been nothing but a revival, in the crudest sense, of the old doctrine of innate ideas. To them Kant’s idea of self-consciousness, as conditioning knowledge, had meant that the individual subject was somehow acted upon by things, and that in consequence of the a priori or innate mechanism of consciousness, the effects of such action took of necessity the forms of space and time and the categories. Beck’s admirable discussion of the Kantian distinctions between analytic and synthetic judgments, synthetic a priori and synthetic a posteriori truths, intuition and thought, phenomena and things-in-themselves, sufficiently showed that these were but excrescences on the Kantian doctrine, merely temporary expedients for bringing the real problems into light; while the definiteness with which he expressed the cardinal doctrine of Kant’s theory, the original synthetic unity of self-consciousness, threw light on all the subordinate points.[10] At the same time, Beck advanced no sufficient grounds for the original positing of the object, which according to him is the very essence of the activity of self-consciousness. His theory failed to explain how and why it is that for the subject there is necessarily the object, the non-Ego. It left still in isolation the separate elements which had been thrown together by Kant. Finally, the acute criticisms of Maimon, for whose talent Fichte expresses unbounded admiration, had shown to demonstration how utterly inconsistent with the genuine Kantian doctrine was the commonly received view of the thing-in-itself. He too, however, misconceived Kant’s idea of self-consciousness, found himself perplexed by the problem of the relation between the categories or forms of thought and the given matter of sense, proceeded to accept experience as consisting of a given series of phenomenal states, with the attributes of space and tune, rejected therefore all a priori truths except the mathematical or quantitative, and thus left untouched the deeper problems raised by the ‘Kritik.’
The way had thus been prepared for Fichte’s endeavour to take up in a comprehensive fashion the speculative question as it had been formulated by Kant, and to work into an organic whole what had been left by Kant in a fragmentary form. The artificial and sometimes forced fashion in which the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ at first proceeded must not disguise from us the genuine nature of the task Fichte had set before him, or the principle which underlies it. Firm adherence to the idea of the transcendental method; determination to accept nothing, whether as fact, law, or notion, which is not deducible from self-consciousness and its necessary conditions,—such is the spirit of the Fichtean philosophy, and from it follows the demand for systematic unity of conception, for a single principle out of which the multiplicity of experience may be deduced, and therefore for a single, all-embracing philosophical science. It is this very consistency which renders the detailed study of the Fichtean system a matter of so much difficulty, for if the fundamental idea be not grasped,—and as Fichte truly says, his philosophy is either to be mastered at a stroke or not at all,—little or none of the help which even Kant affords is extended to the student. The familiar psychological distinctions which furnish natural divisions in the Kantian theory of knowledge, are entirely wanting in the ‘Wissenschaftslehre.’ Sense, understanding, reason, are not assumed as rubrics under which special kinds of knowledge may be arranged, but are regarded as specific modes in the development or realisation of self-consciousness, and appear in their determined position in the series of necessary acts by which self-consciousness is realised. The notions by which popular or unphilosophical thinking manages to explain to itself the nature of things—e.g., the notion of cause by which we think the relation of objects to the variable contents of our representations—are not accepted or permitted to pass until they have been deduced, or shown to arise in the development of the necessary conditions of self-consciousness. The Kantian categories, the anomalous position of which had given occasion to grave misunderstanding of the very meaning of the system, are not in any way assumed as pre-existing forms into which matter falls; but object as formed by the category, and category as form of the object, are deduced together.
If Wissenschaftslehre is to accomplish its object—the systematic evolution of all that enters into consciousness—its starting-point must be found in that which renders any consciousness or knowledge possible. Such starting-point, by its very nature, cannot be a demonstrable fact, nor can it be comprehended in strict logical fashion,—that is, brought under a notion. All certainty rests ultimately on immediate evidence or intuition. The first condition, therefore, of consciousness, must be realised by us in the form of intuition. But the said first condition of consciousness is manifestly the consciousness of self. “Along with whatever any intelligence knows,” says Terrier, whose statement may here be accepted in place of any more elaborate treatment, “it must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge, have some cognisance of itself.” To the speculative inquirer, endeavouring to reconstruct that which is immediately given in experience, the first and common ground for all experience is the result of that act whereby the Ego or self becomes an Ego or self. Of the necessary implications of this fundamental activity and its product, nothing requires at first to be said; philosophy is simply the attempt to give a systematic and complete account of them. But no philosophy can transcend the fact; and any problem referring to that which is absolutely dissevered from the result of the fact, must be dismissed as in terms contradictory and absurd. To ask, for example, whether the activity by which the Ego becomes an Ego does not presuppose the prior existence, in reality,—in an objective fashion,—of the Ego, is merely to make the “wonderful assumption that the Ego is something different from its own consciousness of itself, and that something, heaven knows what, lying beyond this consciousness, is the foundation of it,”[11] and to introduce notions of a complex and hypothetical character, such as existence and time, into the explanation of that with reference to which only have such notions significance. Doubtless, to the popular consciousness, thought presents itself as merely one, and probably one of the least important, of the facts of experience,—as arising from and dependent on the nature of things. But philosophy and popular thinking move on different platforms, and most of the gravest errors in speculation arise from the transference of considerations which are in due place in one of them into the other, where they are absolute absurdities. The philosophical construction of the world of experience is not to be confused with the world of experience itself, nor is it to be taken as a natural—i.e., psychological—history of the development of the individual mind.[12] If in the development of the necessary conditions of self-consciousness, it is shown how the notion of a non-Ego arises,—if feeling and representation are deduced,—it is not to be supposed that by such process of deduction these, as facts of experience, are produced. Production and genetic construction of the contents of consciousness are totally distinct. Life, as Fichte puts it, is non-philosophising, and philosophy is non-living.
The intuition of the activity, whose product is the reflex act of consciousness—an activity the exact nature of which will presently be considered—Fichte calls intellectual intuition. The name is unfortunate, both as regards his predecessor Kant, and as regards his successor Schelling, for, in their systems, the same term is employed to denote two quite diverse facts. In the critical philosophy, intellectual intuition was used to indicate the supposed mode of consciousness by which a knowledge of things-in-themselves might be obtained, and was therefore regarded as contradictory of the very principles of the system. Fichte has little difficulty in showing that, so far as this meaning of the term is concerned, there is no difference of opinion between Kant and himself; but he, at the same time, points out that the whole critical analysis rested upon the fact of the unity of consciousness (or, as Kant called it, the unity of apperception), and that for this unity no name was so appropriate as that of intellectual intuition. On the other hand, in Schelling’s system, intellectual intuition was employed to denote the consciousness of the absolute, of the identity between subject and object; and, in so far, there is a certain resemblance between his use of the term and that of Fichte. There was, however, a fundamental difference between the two thinkers in regard to this identity of subject and object; and in his later writings, Fichte, to emphasise his opposition to Schelling, generally employed the expression, free activity, to denote the fundamental act and product of the Ego.
In calling the consciousness of the fundamental activity of the Ego intuition, Fichte had a twofold object. He desired to bring into prominence the fact that he is not starting with any abstract notion, but with the activity of the Ego—an activity not to be designated thought, or will, or by any other complex, and therefore misleading, term; and further, to indicate from the outset what was the peculiar nature of the general method of Wissenschaftslehre. For an intuition is never a datum which is simply received in experience. It is invariably the product of a constructive act The intuition of a triangle, for example, is the consciousness of a definite and necessarily determined procedure of construction within the limitations of space; and in this process of construction we see intuitively the connection of the elements, we see how each subsequent portion of the construction is determined by what has preceded; and as the process is general, determined only by the conditions of space, we are at the same time aware of the generality of the result. Intuitive knowledge, therefore, is genetic, and Wissenschaftslehre, the systematic consciousness of what is contained in the fundamental intellectual intuition, must likewise be genetic in method. Wissenschaftslehre will show “that the fundamental proposition, posited and immediately known as existent in consciousness, is impossible unless under a further condition, and that this further condition is likewise impossible unless a third be added,—until the conditions of the first are completely developed, and the possibility of the same completely comprehended.”[13] It will “construct the whole common consciousness of all rational beings in its fundamental characteristics, with pure a priori evidence, just as geometry constructs, with pure a priori evidence, the general modes of limitation of space by all rational beings. It starts from the simplest and most characteristic quality of self-consciousness, the intuition of the Ego,[14] and, under the assumption that the completely qualified self-consciousness is the final result of all the other qualifications of consciousness, proceeds until this is thoroughly deduced. To each link in the chain of these qualifications a new one is added, and it is clear, in the direct intuition of them, that the same addition must take place in the consciousness of every rational being. Call the Ego A. Then, in the intuition of the construction of A, it is seen that B is inseparably connected with it. In the intuition of the construction of B, it is equally clear that C is an inseparable link, and so on, till we reach the final member of A,—completed self-consciousness,—which manifests itself as complete and perfect.”[15]
No commentary upon these passages seems necessary, save perhaps on the expression, “completed self-consciousness,” of which, indeed, the system itself is the best explanation. On both sides, this notion of completed self-consciousness requires to be guarded or defined with regard to its essence as self-consciousness, and with regard to its completion. To popular thinking, self-consciousness is identical with individuality,—with the knowledge of self as a personal, active being, related to others, and to a universe of things. But it is at once evident that knowledge of individuality in this sense is a complex fact, and a fact of which the ground or possibility must be sought in the original act whereby the subject is conscious at all. “The Ego of real consciousness is always particular, and isolated: it is a person among other persons, each of whom describes himself as an Ego; and Wissenschaftslehre must develop up to the point at which such consciousness is explained. Totally distinct from this is the Ego from which Wissenschaftslehre starts; for this is nothing but the identity of the conscious subject with that of which it is conscious. Abstraction from all else that is contained in personality is necessary in order to attain this point of view.”[16] Self-consciousness, in fact, is the common element in all knowledge and action, and therefore cannot in itself contain that which is special and particular to the individual It is the ground of individuality; for without it there could not possibly be the developed, concrete consciousness of personality; but as ground, it is distinct from that which is conditioned by it. We may call it, if we choose, the pure Ego, or form of the Ego,—Fichte, as above noted, occasionally employs the untranslatable term Ich-heit,—but under whatever fashion of speech, we have to recognise in it the indispensable condition of all consciousness. Intellectual intuition lies at the basis of all more developed modes of mental action.
What, then, is to be understood by completed self-consciousness? Evidently, the realisation in consciousness of all that can be shown to be necessarily implied or involved in intellectual intuition as such. For it may very well happen that the peculiar activity of the Ego, in becoming conscious of itself, implies a number of intermediate stages,—such, for instance, as the definite separation of subject and object, self and not-self; the definite representation of each of these under special forms; the recognition of a plurality of individual active beings, with rights and duties; and all of these may speculatively be exhibited as following from, and dependent on, self-consciousness itself. In that case, completed self-consciousness would mean, not simply the abstract moment of self-identity, but the consciousness to which the individual may arrive, that he occupies a place in an ideal system of conscious beings, in an ideal order; that his finite existence is to be regarded as the continuous effort to realise what is implied in that position; and thus, that his individuality is lost or absorbed in the universal, rational order. All knowledge and the varied forms of law, of state mechanism, of moral duties, of religious beliefs, would thus appear to consciousness as necessary elements of the scheme or plan of the ideal world; and the consciousness of this ideal system, which it is the business of speculative philosophy to describe, would be completed self-consciousness. This is, in substance, the distinction which Fichte indicates between the Ego as intellectual intuition, and the Ego as idea, “The idea of the Ego has only this in common with the Ego as intuition, that in both the Ego is thought as not individual,—in the latter, because the form of the Ego is not yet denned to the point of individuality; in the former, conversely, because the individual is lost in thought and action according to universal laws. The two are opposed in this, that in the Ego as intuition only the form of the Ego is to be found, and no reference can be made to any special matter,—which indeed becomes conceivable only when the thought of a world arises in the Ego—while, on the other hand, in the Ego as idea, the whole matter of the Ego is thought. From the first, speculative cognition proceeds, and to the latter it tends: only in the practical sphere can the idea be posited as the ultimate goal of the efforts of reason. The first is original intuition, and becomes for us, when treated by thought, a notion (Begriff): the latter is idea only; it cannot be thought in a determinate fashion; it can never exist realiter, but we must continuously approximate to it.”[17] It need not surprise us that Fichte, at this period of his philosophical reflection, should frequently use the term God as equivalent to the pure Ego, regarded as idea. Such a doctrine can appear startling only if we identify self-consciousness with individuality, and if we fail to see that were God not involved in self-consciousness, His existence must be for ever contingent or unnecessary for thought. We have here one of the points on which it is instructive to note the difference between Fichte’s position and that of Spinoza. For Spinoza, as for philosophy in general, the supreme problem is to connect the particular with the system of which it is a part,—a problem which we may call the reduction of the many to one, or by what phrase we please. Now the one and the many are definitely described by Spinoza, but so separated as to render transition or union wellnigh impossible. As in the Eleatic system, so in that of Spinoza, the two elements fall asunder. It is true that Spinoza seems to have thought the problem solved by pointing to the impossibility of thinking the particular or finite, save as in relation to the infinite; but his treatment of this necessity of thinking is the weak point in his system. Modes of thought become for him so many finite objects, mutually determining and determined; and any relation to substance is thus, for them, impossible. To an intellect regarding finite modes from without, it might well be impossible to think of them, except as limitations of the infinite substance; but no such thought is possible for the finite modes themselves. The two notions with which Spinoza works—substance and mutual determination—are irreconcilable; and their subjective counterparts, understanding and imagination, are, in a similar fashion, left standing side by side.[18] It is on account of this failure to unite the two elements of his system that Fichte classes Spinoza as a dogmatist, and points out that his own doctrine, on the speculative side, is Spinozism, but, as containing the higher synthesis, an inverted or spiritualised Spinozism. The same criticism is contained in Hegel’s pregnant remark, that Spinoza’s error lay in regarding God as substance, and not as spirit.
Before passing to the more explicit statement of the development of self-consciousness—i.e., to the systematic portion of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’—it may be remarked that in this notion of the Ego as both abstract unity and concrete fulness, we have the transition from the Kantian to the later philosophy of Hegel. For Hegel as for Fichte, philosophy is the systematic development of thought from its most abstract moment to the fulness and wealth of real existence, and the culminating point is the complete consciousness of thought as that which, systematically developed, is the reality of existence. In treatment of many problems the two thinkers differ; in matter, and to a large extent in form, they are at one.
3.—First principles of ‘Wissenschaftslehre.’
As science of science, or theory of that which is presupposed in all consciousness, Wissenschaftslehre must take its origin from that which is in itself unsusceptible of proof. Its first principle cannot be a proposition for which reasons can be advanced; it cannot even be the expression of a fact which is given in experience; but it must express that which lies at the basis of all experience, of all consciousness. The matter of the first principle must therefore be unconditioned, and equally so the form. We may indeed assume that alongside of this absolutely unconditioned first principle, two other propositions may be given, two expressions of necessary acts in the development of self-consciousness,—the one, unconditioned in form though determined as regards matter; the other, unconditioned in matter, though determined as regards form. More than these three there cannot be assumed; all other propositions in the theory of consciousness must be deducible from them.
What, then, is the first principle of the Wissenschaftslehre? Evidently, from the exposition already given of the nature of this science, the first principle can be nothing but an explicit statement of the very innermost nature of self-consciousness. For all consciousness, and therefore all experience, is determined by self-consciousness, and stands under it as its supreme condition. The first truth must therefore be the express statement of that fundamental activity by which consciousness comes to be. Beyond all doubt this fundamental activity is not to be thought as an object in consciousness, as one of the facts which we may discover by inner observation. As opposed to all the mechanical necessity under which facts appear for us, this activity is freedom as such,—pure action, which, indeed, is or has being, but is not to be regarded as being.
The explicit statement of this fundamental activity is reached in Fichte’s first systematic work, the ‘Grundlage des Wissenschaftslehre,’ by a somewhat artificial method; and unfortunately, the few pages containing the application of this method not only exhaust the ordinary student’s knowledge of the system, but supply almost all that is given of Fichte’s doctrine in the ordinary histories of philosophy. To this cause one must refer much of the misunderstanding which has undoubtedly existed regarding the true nature of Fichte’s speculative work. The method is certainly artificial, but as the activity in question is absolutely unconditioned, there is not, as it were, any one defined road by which it is to be approached. Fichte, accordingly, proposes to take an undeniable fact of ordinary, empirical thought, and by criticism to show what is implied in it. The fact selected is the well-known logical or formal law of identity,—A is A. A is A; that is, independently of all material considerations as to what A may be, this at least is true, that it is itself,—it is A. But such a purely formal proposition makes no assertion regarding the positing or affirming of A. It asserts merely that if A is posited, then it is = A: in other words, it asserts the absolute and unconditioned validity of a certain nexus or bond = x. The nexus or bond, the law according to which we judge that A is A, is only in consciousness, is only for the Ego; consequently the proposition A = A may be expressed thus: A is for the Ego simply and solely by virtue of being affirmed or posited in the Ego; and the nexus (x), the ground of this identity, is the affirmation of the existence of the Ego, I am. Only in and for a consciousness that is aware of its own identity, can the law A = A have validity. The unity and identity of self-consciousness thus lies at the basis of all empirical consciousness, for all empirical consciousness falls under the rule, A = A. But if the proposition A = A, valid for all empirical consciousness, has validity only because it is grounded on the fact of the identity of self-consciousness, Ego = Ego, this identity must be the pure act of the Ego itself, the mere expression or product of the activity by which the Ego is the Ego at all. Self-affirmation, then, is given simply, unconditionally, as the being of the Ego. The Ego is, because it posits itself as being; it posits itself as being, because it is. The fundamental activity of all consciousness is thus the affirmation of itself by the Ego. “The Ego posits originally and simply its own being.”[19]
The method of arriving at this first proposition,—one absolutely unconditioned in matter as in form, for the Ego is the common condition of all matter of consciousness in general, and the affirmation of its self-identity, the form of the proposition, is not prescribed to it from without,—is otherwise given by Fichte in his later expositions.[20] In them the reader is called upon to make the experiment of thinking any given object, and then of thinking the Ego. In the first act, the characteristic feature is the definite and recognised distinction in consciousness between the subject thinking and the object thought. In the second, it is equally plain that the Ego thought and the Ego thinking are one and the same. The activity of thought is reflected upon itself, and in this reflection upon self consists the very essence of the Ego, or of self-consciousness. “The procedure of Wissenschaftslehre is the following: it requires each one to note what he necessarily does when he calls himself, I. It assumes that every one who really performs the required act, will find that he affirms himself, or, which may be clearer to many, that he is at the same time subject and object. In this absolute identity of subject and object consists the very nature of the Ego. The Ego is that which cannot be subject, without being, in the same indivisible act, object—and cannot be object, without being, in the same indivisible act, subject; and conversely, whatever has this characteristic, is Ego; the two expressions are the same.”[21]
Thus the first proposition is the explicit statement of that which underlies all consciousness,—of the act whereby consciousness is possible. It is the same proposition which implicitly had appeared in the critical philosophy under the term unity of apperception; but the full significance of it had not been developed by Kant. Beyond this truth no philosophy can go, and all true philosophy depends upon the recognition of it. Any metaphysical theorem which assumes an origin or cause for consciousness transcending this first, primitive affirmation of the Ego by itself, is self-convicted of incompleteness and absurdity.
It is perhaps needless to note that the Ego referred to is not to be identified with the individual or person. Each individual or person has in common the consciousness of self, without which he exists not at all; but to be individual or person, more is required than is contained in self-consciousness. Accordingly, as we shall later see, although Fichte will not deny to God self-consciousness in the sense here, analysed, he will not admit that God is personal or individual To identify any one thing or person with self-consciousness is absurd. Self-consciousness is not a thing or fact to be observed; just as little is God one among the objects of experience to be thought of as coexisting with finite spirits, conditioning or determining them, and in turn conditioned or determined by them. There is, and can be, from the position of pure thought, no God except the ideal system which is involved in self-consciousness, and in which finite spirits have a definite place and function.
The fundamental mode of activity, the position of the Ego by itself, if regarded in abstracto, is the logical law of identity—i.e., no identity of object can be thought apart from the identity of the thinking self. If regarded as in application to objects, it is the category of reality. All reality is in and for the Ego. The categories are merely the necessary modes of action of self-consciousness viewed objectively, or in relation to the object.
Alongside of this first principle, which is unconditioned both in matter and in form, there may be placed for the purposes of the Wissenschaftslehre two further principles, one unconditioned in form but conditioned in matter, the other conditioned as to form but unconditioned as to matter. By an artificial procedure resembling that adopted in the case of the first principle, Fichte brings forward the second, on the nature and position of which the greatest misconception has prevailed.
As certainly as the proposition, A = A, appears in empirical consciousness, so certainly appears the allied but distinct proposition, Not-A does not =A. This proposition is not to be taken as a mere reduplication in negative form of the rule of identity; it is not equivalent to the judgment, Not-A = Not-A. For there is implied in it a new element, Not-A, and a totally new and distinct act, that of opposing to A its negative, Not-A. So far as matter is concerned, the proposition is determined; for if there is to be op-positing at all, that which is opposed to A can only be Not-A. But the form of the proposition, the act of negation, is not conditioned by the form of affirmation. Now, if we treat this proposition as we treated the first, resolving it into its ultimate terms, we have as result the opposition, in the Ego, of Ego and non-Ego. In the Ego, the non-Ego is opposed to the Ego. This second proposition is fundamental in the Fichtean philosophy, but at the same time its significance is not immediately evident. On the one hand, it is clear what is not to be understood by the non-Ego in question. The non-Ego is not the thing-in-itself. It is impossible and contradictory that the Ego should affirm for itself the being of that which, by definition, is not for the Ego. On the other hand, it is not yet plain, and, indeed, it only becomes plain from much later developments of the system, what is the precise nature of the act of oppositing or negating. The obscurity which rests over the proposition arises from two sources. In the first place, Fichte accepts, as given, a fact of empirical consciousness, the fact of difference or opposition, and shows that for a self-conscious subject, the ultimate ground of all difference is the distinction of self and not-self. No opposition or difference in empirical knowledge is conceivable, if the Ego has not in itself the moment of difference. As mere abstract statement of what is implied in real consciousness, the proposition has, therefore, unconditioned truth; but it has not thereby been made clear how real consciousness, which is determined or limited, is related to the pure unity of self-consciousness as such. All limitation is negation—this is fundamental for Fichte as for Spinoza, and in the second proposition the ground of the maxim is given—but it is not thereby explained why or how there should be limitation at all. In the second place, the all-important distinction between the abstract and concrete moments of self-consciousness is easily overlooked. Fichte is here giving expression to the most abstract aspect of consciousness, which becomes real or concrete only after the introduction of many other elements. The non-Ego referred to is the abstract aspect of that which in the further movement of thought presents itself as the world of objects, but it is not in itself the concrete, represented world.
The first proposition, as was said, is not in Fichte’s later expositions approached in the artificial manner adopted in the ‘Grundlage;’ still less is this the case in regard to the second fundamental act. In the later works, specially in the ‘Darstellung aus dem Jahre, 1801,’ and in the posthumous lectures, the statement is much more concrete and intelligible. Self-affirmation of the Ego is the primitive activity of consciousness. But such primitive activity is in itself but the ground of consciousness. The Ego, to be real, must be aware of its own activity as affirming itself. This becoming aware of its own activity Fichte calls reflection; and it is easily seen that the essential feature of reflection is self-limitation of the Ego. But limitation is negation; the Ego becomes aware of its own activity as self-positing only in and by opposition to self. Infinite activity—i.e., activity related only to itself—is never, as such, conscious activity. “Consciousness works through reflection, and reflection is only through limitation.”[22] So soon as we reflect upon the activity of the Ego, the Ego is necessarily finite; so soon as the Ego is conscious of its finitude, it is conscious of striving beyond these limits, and so of its infinitude. Were the question raised, Is the Ego, then, infinite? the Ego, by the very question, is finite. Is the Ego finite? then, to be aware of finitude, it is necessarily infinite; and so on, in endless alternation.
The abstract expression of this alternation between subject and object as in relation to one another, is contained in the third fundamental proposition,—that from which the Wissenschaftslehre definitely takes its start.
The second proposition has brought forward a non-Ego, which is in every respect the negative of the Ego. Whatever is affirmed regarding the one must be explicitly denied of the other. But, if we consider our two propositions, we shall find not only that they contradict one another, but that each proposition, taken in respect of the other, contradicts itself. For if the non-Ego is posited, the Ego is negated; but the Ego is absolute reality, and consequently the non-Ego is only posited through the Ego. The Ego, therefore, both posits and negates itself. It is in itself a contradiction, or unites contradictions in itself. It is evidently impossible that both can be negated; it is equally impossible that one should be negated by the other. The only solution is to be found in some act of the Ego by which it is limited as regards the non-Ego, and by which the non-Ego is limited as regards the Ego: the Ego shall, in part, negate the non-Ego; the non-Ego shall, in part, negate the Ego. So certainly, therefore, as the two fundamental propositions are true, as certainly can they be combined in the unity of self-consciousness, only if the Ego posit in itself a divisible Ego as limited by a divisible non-Ego. In this third proposition the form is conditioned, for by the needs of the prior maxims it is prescribed what the activity must be; the matter is unconditioned, for the notion by which the union is effected—that of limitation—is not prescribed beforehand. The third proposition, therefore, completes the principles of Wissenschaftslehre: henceforth each step in the evolution of self-consciousness can and must be proved to follow with demonstrative evidence from them.
Moreover, the connection of the three principles, and especially the mode by which the third of them was attained, shows clearly what must be the method of evolution. The very essence of self-consciousness, in its double moments of self-position and reflection, is the union of contradictory aspects. Thesis and antithesis are the formal expressions of the activity lying at the root of consciousness. But contradictions can only be for a self-conscious subject when united or contained in some more concrete synthesis. Limitation has manifested itself as the first synthesis; but, narrowly examined, the members there united will be seen to manifest new contradictions, which again require to be resolved into some richer, more concrete notion. The course of procedure is thus the continuous analysis of the antithetical moments of each notion, and the synthetical union of them: the goal is the complete synthetical union of the original opposition of the Ego and the non-Ego in consciousness. Term after term will be introduced, until at last the gap between these two is filled up, and the final synthesis either attained or the full ground for its unattainability made clear. The successive acts by which the new synthesis conies forward, yield, in abstracto, the forms of the categories, which will thus be deduced systematically, not accepted haphazard, as in the critical philosophy. The successive modes of consciousness, in and through which the categories receive application to objects, will be rigorously developed, and not taken from empirical psychology. Wissenschaftslehre is thus not only logic, in the highest sense of the term, but also a phenomenology or pragmatic history of consciousness.
4.—Development of the system.
The fundamental principles contain the groundwork, not only of the developed system of the Wissenschaftslehre in its earlier form, but also of the more abstruse metaphysical view to which Fichte, at a later period, advanced. The union of opposites, as the very essence of consciousness, and the reference of the opposed members to the identity of the absolute Ego, although very differently expressed, remain common ground for both the earlier and the later systematic treatments. In the first form of Wissenschaftslehre, however, the interest centres mainly in the deduction of the consequences involved in the original synthesis; in the later exposition, the synthesis itself, as a whole, is interpreted in a new and more concrete fashion.
As it is impossible here to follow the details of the elaborate and compressed reasoning by which Fichte, in the ‘Grundlage’ and ‘Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen d. Wissenschaftslehre,’ traces the successive stages or aspects of thought contained in the primitive synthesis, it will be advisable to preface a summary of his results by a freer and less technical statement of their significance.
The original synthesis—in the Ego, the divisible Ego is opposed to the divisible non-Ego—evidently contains two propositions, each of which may be subjected to analytic treatment;[23] for, in the first place, it is implied in our proposition that the Ego posits the non-Ego as determined by the Ego; and in the second place, it is implied that the Ego posits itself as determined by the non-Ego. The second of these is the fundamental proposition for the theoretical Wissenschaftslehre—that is, it expresses the very essence of the Ego as intelligence generally. The first is the expression of the essence of the Ego as practical The ultimate synthesis must be found in that notion in which the theoretical and practical activities of the Ego are identified. At the present stage, such ultimate synthesis appears problematical in fact, and scarcely conceivable in thought. The approach to it must be effected by following out the two isolated expressions according to the general method already recognised. We may thus hope to make clear, first, what the non-Ego, as in thought, must be for the Ego; in other words, we may hope to obtain a complete survey of the formal determinations of thought in and through which it is possible for a non-Ego to be presented to intelligence. How there should be a non-Ego at all will not thereby be explained; but for solution of this problem we may look, in the second place, to the development of the nature of the Ego as practical
Theoretical Wissenschaftslehre is thus the systematic development of the form of consciousness in which Ego and non-Ego are opposed, and so opposed that the Ego is determined by the non-Ego. Opposition of this kind between Ego and non-Ego is the characteristic feature of cognitive consciousness or intelligence. We may therefore express the business of the theoretical Wissenschaftslehre as the analysis of the notions, categories, or necessary modes of action of intelligence, implied in, and making tip, the essence of the recognition of a non-Ego by the Ego. Popular thinking or philosophical theory employs various notions in its effort to explain the relation between Ego and non-Ego. The Wissenschaftslehre has to deduce these notions, to assign to them their value by exhibiting them in their due place as stages or aspects of thought, and systematically to develop them from the fundamental antithesis. The results of the Wissenschaftslehre, so far as it is theoretical, are purely formal; and Kant was in a measure correct when he described Wissenschaftslehre as mere logic. But it was Kant’s mistake, and it has been the mistake of most critics of the system, to confine their view to one limited aspect of it. Fichte was well aware that the deduction of the categories, which he was the first to undertake in a genuinely philosophical fashion,—nay, that the exposition of the modes of subjective thinking, such as representation, understanding, judgment, reasoning,—can have, within the limits of theoretical Wissenschaftslehre, nothing but formal worth. It was for him a simple and incontrovertible truth, that knowledge, as knowledge, is of necessity opposed to, and distinct from reality. Such opposition is the very essence of knowledge; and if it can be shown—as Fichte thought it could be shown—that this opposition necessarily assumes in the Ego the form of representation (Vorstellung), then it is absolutely certain that for the cognitive Ego there are only representations. Reality is given only in immediate perception, or in the element of feeling; and feeling is practical, not theoretical The logical categories, which alone give significance for intelligence to the non-Ego, do not contain in themselves the element of fact; and were there no practical Wissenschaftslehre, philosophy would remain where it had been left by Kant,—for Kant had seen that the affection of sense was indispensable if real concrete matter were to be supplied for the action of intelligence, but he had attempted no deduction of affection. It remained, in his system, a foreign ingredient; and his incompetent followers had, without hesitation, assigned the thing-in-itself as ground of explanation. From the very outset of his speculation, Fichte had maintained that in his system alone was t v o be found the solution for the difficulty left by Kant,—that sensuous affection was there shown to be a necessary element for intellectual function, and that sensuous affection was there deduced from the Ego, though not from the Ego as cognitive.
“The intellectual intuition from which we have started is not possible without sensuous intuition, and this not without feeling. It is a total misunderstanding of my meaning, and a simple reversal of the very meaning and purport of my system, to ascribe to me the opposed view. But sense, intuition, and feeling are just as impossible without intellectual intuition. I cannot be for myself without being something (etwas = a definite somewhat), and I am this only in the world of sense; I can just as little be for myself without being Ego,—and this I am only in the intelligible world, which discloses itself to me through intellectual intuition. The point of union between the two lies in this, that what I am in the first, I am for myself only through absolute self-activity regulated by thought. Our existence in the intelligible world is the moral law; our existence in the world of sense is actual fact: the combining link is freedom, as absolute ability to determine the latter through the former.”[24] For this reason Fichte found himself on so many points in harmony with Jacobi, whose general tendency in speculation was otherwise opposed. For this reason he frequently employs expressions that are easily misunderstood, but which sound as though his philosophy were one of so-called Common-sense. The point is of the last importance, and if not kept in view, a totally false impression of the system will be obtained.
In the theoretical Wissenschaftslehre, therefore, we may expect, first, a pure logic of the notions through which the non-Ego is for the Ego; and, second, a genetic or pragmatic history of the forms of thinking in which the non-Ego is apprehended. The course of the deduction of the notions is the following:—
The proposition—The Ego posits itself as determined by the non-Ego—yields, on analysis,[25] the opposed expressions, The Ego is passive as determined by the non-Ego; and, The Ego, positing itself, is active. Not only is each of these expressions a contradiction in itself, but they are mutually contradictory, and, if the unity of consciousness is to be preserved, must be united through some synthetic and more concrete notion. Such notion is readily seen to be but a richer form of the category of limitation or determination, from which the opposites took their rise. The Ego is partly determined, partly determines itself. So much reality as the Ego posits in itself, so much does it negate in the non-Ego; so much reality as it posits in the non-Ego, so much does it negate in itself. This notion, in which Ego and non-Ego are thought as mutually determining, is called by Fichte the category of Reciprocal Determination (Wechsel-bestimmung).
But the expressions which have been united in this second synthesis are themselves contradictory. Each, therefore, must be analytically treated and synthetically solved, while a final synthesis will result from the combination of the notions so reached,—a final synthesis which shall take up, in a developed form, the category of reciprocal determination. The first expression, The non-Ego determines the Ego, contains, as antithetical elements, The non-Ego has reality, for only so can it determine the Ego; and, secondly, The non-Ego has no reality, for it is only negation of the Ego, which alone has reality. Now, the positing of the Ego, through which it has reality, is pure activity. The non-Ego, as negation of the Ego, can, therefore, have reality, not in itself, but only in so far as the Ego is passive or negatively active. The notion which thus effects the desired synthesis is that of causality,—for the non-Ego may thus be thought as having reality in so far as the Ego is affected (or passive). Reciprocal determination in this new notion acquires greater definiteness, for the order of determination is fixed. The one factor has positive, the other negative, activity.
The second expression, The Ego determines itself, likewise contains antithetical elements—viz., The Ego is determining, and therefore active,—The Ego determines itself, and is therefore passive. Now the Ego, as positing, is the sum of all reality, and therefore of activity. But, as positing, it posits a definite portion of this total sphere of reality, and every definition is negative as respects the whole. The Ego, therefore, is passive through its own activity. As sum of reality and activity, the Ego is substance; a definite portion of the sphere of reality or activity is accident. The new notion, the synthesis of substance, thus gives a fresh definiteness to the category of reciprocal determination. The passivity of the Ego is determined through its activity.
The two syntheses—that of causality, in which the Ego is passive through activity of the non-Ego, and that of substance, in which the Ego is passive through its own activity—are the two most important propositions in the theory of knowledge; for they are the abstract expressions for the counter-views of dogmatic realism and subjective idealism. If the relation of Ego and non-Ego is thought simply through the notion of causality, all representation (Vorstellung) is regarded as the effect of an objective system of things. If the relation is thought through the notion of substance, all representations are viewed as states of the Ego.[26] Neither view is coherent: for the theory of representation as effect of the non-Ego does not explain how such representation should be thought by the Ego; and the theory of representation as state of the Ego does not explain why the Ego should oppose to itself a non-Ego. They are, moreover, mutually destructive. A new synthesis must be found, wherein shall be contained the antithetical elements,—passivity of the Ego as determined by activity of the non-Ego,—passivity of the Ego as determined by its own activity. Realism and idealism must be united in ideal-realism.
The exposition of this new synthesis, extending over some seventy pages of the closest reasoning, interrupted by frequent digressions, and complicated by divisions, subdivisions and cross divisions, is the hardest and most involved portion of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre.’ Divested, so far as possible, of its technical terminology, the result may be presented somewhat as follows. The Ego and non-Ego have now appeared in thought as mutually determining and determined, and the final relation between them may be expressed in the notion of reciprocal action and passion (Wechsel-Thun-und-Leiden). But such a relation can only be for intelligence, if there be given some activity of consciousness which is at once determining and determined, which shall at once posit the Ego as limited by the non-Ego, and the non-Ego as the limit of the Ego. The Ego itself is pure activity, total reality. The new act must therefore mediately posit each of the two opposed factors. It must affirm the non-Ego as limiting, determining the Ego; and at the same time must affirm or posit tins limitation, as a limitation of the Ego. The limit shall be posited only in so far as the Ego is affirmed as passive; the Ego shall be affirmed only in so far as the limit is posited. This activity, by which the infinitude of the Ego is limited, this activity which continuously mediates between the opposites of infinitude and finitude—for the Ego is infinite, but, as reflective, as conscious of itself, it is finite—Fichte describes by the term already familiar to students of Kant, Productive Imagination. It is the necessary activity of thought by which definiteness, or determinateness, becomes possible for thought. By it alone the Ego becomes subject and has the object over against it. Subject and object are, in fact, the opposites of Ego and non-Ego as appearing in theoretical cognition. No subject without an object; no object without a subject. Productive imagination it is which wins for us definite things from the “void and formless infinite.” All reality is for us through imagination—a proposition which may afford matter for reflection to those who assume that a speculative philosophy in any way endeavours to transcend experience. The product of imagination, the representation (Vorstellung), is at once objective, for it can only be thought as related to the non-Ego—and subjective, for it is only for the reflective subject. Hence arises that curious and most obscure property of Vorstellungen, that they are invariably thought as representations of some reality; hence arises, for us, the opposition between the subjective and objective orders of experience.[27] A thing, logically regarded, is but a complex of relations envisaged in imagination—i.e., represented or definitely embodied.[28]
“All difficulties,” Fichte concludes, “are thus satisfactorily solved. The problem was, to unite the opposites, Ego and non-Ego. Through the faculty of imagination, which unites contradictories, these may be completely reconciled. The non-Ego is itself a product of the self-determining Ego, and not anything posited as absolute and external to the Ego. An Ego that posits itself as self-positing—i.e., as a subject—is impossible without an object produced in the fashion just described (the very characteristic of the Ego, its reflection upon itself as a definite somewhat, is possible only under the condition that it limit itself through an opposite). There remains over only the question how and by what means the limit, which is here assumed as explaining representation for the Ego, comes to be at all. This question lies beyond the limits of the theoretical Wissenschaftslehre, and is not to be answered within them.”[29]
Faculty of productive imagination is, therefore, the fundamental cognitive activity.[30] It is, however, only the ground of Vorstellung; the more definite qualifications of representation are due to other activities of consciousness. These Fichte proceeds to trace with much minuteness, giving what he describes as a “pragmatic history of consciousness.” The ‘Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre,’ in particular, contains an extraordinarily minute analysis and description of sensation and intuition, with a much more detailed deduction of the forms of intuition than is put forward in the ‘Grundlage.’ The characteristic feature of the treatment is the continuous reference of the processes described on the one hand to the non-Ego, as to that with which they are concerned; on the other hand, to the Ego, as to that by which they are posited or exist. The successive acts are, in truth, stages in the development of productive imagination, and arise through the continuous reflection of the Ego upon each of the stages. The treatment is thus what in Fichte’s system would correspond to psychology.
The lowest stage, the first moment of the process by which the Ego becomes definitely conscious of the opposition involved in its nature, is that in which the Ego finds itself limited or rendered passive. This state or condition—for the Ego is not reflectively aware of the activity which is, nevertheless, involved in it—is sensation (Empfindung), All sensation is accompanied by the feeling of the passivity of the Ego—i.e., by the feeling of constraint or necessity. This feeling of compulsion, enriched by other products of the reflective energy of the Ego, is an essential element in the belief in external reality.
Sensation, however, though a passive state, is only for the Ego; the Ego reflects upon its own state, and there is thus introduced the distinction between self and not-self, which is the characteristic feature of all reflection. The sensation taken reflectively, and thereby referred to the non-Ego, is intuition (Anschauung). As the Ego is not reflectively aware of the activity by which it so objectifies sensation, it is, in the process of intuition, absorbed or sunk in the contemplation of the object.[31] The intuition, however, is, equally with sensation, for the Ego; and the Ego, becoming reflectively aware of intuition as an activity, a product of its own, so converts intuition into a subjective fact, a mental representation or image (Bild). The twofold action of the Ego in reflection upon intuition—that by which it contemplates intuition as the object, that by which subjectively it is aware that the intuition is a mental fact—explains the thought-relation between the external object as the original, and the intuition as its copy or representative, and also explains the distinction we draw in consciousness between inner and outer intuition. Outer intuition is the process thought as determined with respect to the content or attributes of its product; inner intuition, the process thought as subjectively mine, and therefore free or unconstrained as to mode of action by the object. There thus arises for consciousness the important difference between necessity and contingency in the sphere of intuition,—a difference which rests upon and implies the distinction of intuitions from one another, their reciprocal determination, and the determined sequence of acts of intuition. The condition under which distinction of intuitions as objects from one another is possible is space; the condition under which determined acts of intuition are possible is time.[32]
Intuition, as such, is not yet a fixed product for the Ego. The productive imagination, of which intuition is a mode, fixes nothing. The definite fixing or relating of intuitions is the work of understanding (Verstand), and all reality for cognition is in and through the understanding. The modes of fixing are the categories already deduced as involved in the very essence of consciousness, and Fichte is thus enabled to show what Kant had failed to do,—that category, schema, and intuition are organically united; that the categories are not empty forms into which matter is thrown from without, but arise with the objects themselves.
The understanding, of which the products are thoughts or notions, is itself subject to reflection, and to a reflection which is, as opposed to understanding, abstractive or free. The reflective action of the Ego upon the whole world of objects of understanding is judgment (Urtheilskraft). The highest stage of consciousness is reflection upon judgment, for in this, abstraction is made of all save the Ego itself. The Ego in its pure abstraction and consciousness of self is reason (Vernunft). The more complete this power of abstraction, this withdrawal from objectivity, the more closely does the empirical approach pure consciousness.
The theoretical Wissenschaftslehre has developed completely the form of cognition, and has shown that this form is an organic or systematic whole. But it has proceeded from a proposition containing an element not yet deduced or explained. The Ego, positing itself as determined by a non-Ego, has been shown to effect this position by a series of necessary, synthetic acts, through which both Ego and non-Ego have appeared as determined and in relations to one another. Alongside of this fundamental proposition, however, there stood a second, equally necessary for consciousness—viz., that the Ego posits itself as determining the non-Ego. The form of cognition rests entirely on the opposition between non-Ego and Ego, but explains in no way the origin of this opposition. The investigation must now be directed upon the second proposition—the foundation of the practical Wissenschaftslehre—in order to discover whether in it there may not be given a solution of the presupposition on which the form of knowledge has rested. The practical Wissenschaftslehre is not developed by Fichte with the same dialectical vigour as had been manifest in the treatment of knowledge, and the more important doctrines are to be sought, not in the ‘Grundlage,’ but in the introductions to the systematic works on Law and Morals.[33]
The Ego as cognitive recognises reality in the non-Ego, and as active or practical, as determining the non-Ego, likewise ascribes reality to it. But how is it possible that there should be for the Ego, which is pure activity, mere self-position, a negation or opposition? How is the primitive act of oppositing, already noted as the most obscure and perplexed feature of the system, possible for the Ego? It would be possible if the Ego were to limit itself,—if in addition to the activity by which the Ego posits itself, there were given another activity—e.g., that of limitation,—for the mode of action of this second activity must necessarily be opposition. If we call the first activity pure, the second may be called objective. The union of pure and objective activity in the Ego would explain the Anstoss or opposition upon which all cognition depends. The pure activity, as self-related, is infinite; the objective activity is finite and limitative. If the Ego is to unite both, it must be an infinite activity which is at the same time, though not in the same sense, finite; it must be an infinite striving. Striving implies opposition, for without obstacle, without impediment, there is only boundless activity. How shall the infinite activity of the Ego be thought as infinite striving? The Ego is, but it is only for itself. Reflection is thus the very law of existence for a conscious Ego. The Ego is only the Ego, in so far as it reflects. But this reflection is the very limitative obstacle of which the practical Wissenschaftslehre is in search, and the problem is therefore solved. If the Ego be not activity,—infinite self-position,—there can be no striving. If the Ego be not reflective, it cannot be conscious of itself; it remains a thing, and not an Ego. Thus the practical activity of the Ego is the ground of the Anstoss, which renders intelligence possible; while reflection is the ground of the self-consciousness of the Ego. For an Ego which is not reflective, which is not opposed by a non-Ego, self-consciousness is impossible, and to such an Ego the system of Wissenschaftslehre has no application.
The complete synthesis of the opposed propositions from which the start was made, has now been reached; the practical and theoretical activities of the Ego are shown to be necessarily related to one another, and to the absolute Ego. Without simple self-position of the Ego—i.e., without the absolute Ego as the idea of all reality—there can be no infinite striving, and without infinite striving, no intelligence. At the root of the infinite striving of the Ego lies the idea of the infinitude of the absolute Ego—an idea which, from the necessary reflection of the Ego, is never completely realised, but towards which there is an endless tendency in the Ego. The Ego, as infinite but reflective activity under the idea of the absolute tendency towards self-realisation, is the practical Ego, and the series of stages throughout which it passes is the ideal series. The Ego, as limited by the non-Ego, but at the same time as continuously transcending this opposition, is theoretical, and the series of stages through which it passes is the real series. “And so the whole nature of finite, rational beings is comprehended and explained. Original idea of our absolute being; striving towards reflection upon self according to this idea; limitation, not of this striving, but of our real being, which is first given through the limitation—through the opposing principle, a non-Ego—or, generally, through our finitude; self-consciousness, and in particular consciousness of our practical striving; determination of our representations thereby (with freedom and without freedom); through this, determination of our actions the direction of our real, sensuous existence; continual extension of the limits to our activity.”[34]
Although all expositions of Fichte’s philosophy bring into prominence the fact that for him reason as practical is the ground of reason as theoretical, the significance of the fact, so far as his general theory of knowledge is concerned, does not seem to have received sufficient attention. It has not seen how the practical side of Wissenschaftslehre bears upon and supplements the proposition from which Fichte never departs—that knowledge is formal only, and that reality is not contained in the form of thought or cognition. Kant had made the same proposition a feature of his system, but had never been able to offer any explanation of it, and manifestly remained under the impression that in Fichte’s theoretical Wissenschaftslehre, the attempt was made to extract reality out of mere form of thought.[35] This, however, is by no means the truth. Self-consciousness is only realised in the form of knowledge, but the form of realisation is not the reality itself. Opposition between self and not-self is the necessary form of self-consciousness, but the necessity of the form does not explain the reality attaching to the two factors. It is on this account that Fichte so continuously lays stress on the principle that the primitive datum of consciousness is not a fact to be cognised under the necessary form of knowledge, but the product of an act; that the essence of the conscious being is not representation or knowledge, but activity or freedom, which is cognised under the forms of representation or knowledge. The necessary implication of activity and cognition is, therefore, the answer supplied by him to the problem left unsolved by Kant—the problem of the relation between intellectual function and affection of sense.
In tracing the series of stages through which the practical Ego seeks realisation for itself, Fichte is describing the successive forms of real fact which underlie, and are necessarily involved in, the existence of a self-conscious subject. The complete exposition affords the groundwork for two comprehensive philosophical doctrines—that of Rights or Law, and that of Duties or Morals—while it culminates in a statement as to the bearing of Wissenschaftslehre on the fundamental problem of theology.[36] No account can here be given of the systematic treatment of the doctrines of Law and Ethics. It must suffice to indicate how these doctrines are related to the general principles of Fichte’s practical philosophy, and in what respects their fundamental notions were altered or amended in the later stage of his speculation.
The Ego, as has been seen, is in essence activity; but at the same time, if an Ego at all, it must posit, affirm, or be aware of its own activity. The twofold aspect of the Ego, as at once activity and reflection upon activity, must ever be kept in mind when the effort is made to trace further the conditions of self-consciousness. As in the case of the several stages of cognition, so here, it will be found that the forms of practical activity result from the continuous reflection of the Ego upon the modes and products of its own action. The most general statement which can be made regarding the whole process, sums up what is developed in the successive steps by which the practical Ego realises itself.
Under what conditions can the Ego be conscious of itself? Only in so far as it is practical, in so far as it is a striving force, only in so far as it is will. “The practical Ego is the Ego of original self-consciousness; a rational being immediately perceives itself only in willing; and were it not practical, would perceive neither itself nor the world—would not be an intelligence at all. Will is in a special sense the essence of reason.”[37] This striving of the Ego is only possible for consciousness in so far as it is limited or opposed, and the state of consciousness in which this hindrance to striving is posited has already been described as feeling. Striving which is opposed, but not absolutely, is impulse (Trieb). The very innermost nature of the Ego is therefore impulse. The Ego is a system of impulses. Feeling in which the impulse or force of the Ego is checked, is necessarily a feeling of incapacity or of compulsion, and the combination of the immediate consciousness of our own striving with the feeling of compulsion or restraint is for us the first and most simple criterion of reality. The external thing is for us as real as the activity of the Ego with which it is bound up. “Only through the relation of feeling to the Ego is reality possible for the Ego, whether reality of itself or of the non-Ego. Now, that which is possible only through the relation of feeling to the Ego, while the Ego neither is nor can be conscious of its intuition of the same, and which therefore seems to be felt, is matter of belief. There is, then, simply belief in reality in general, whether of Ego or of non-Ego.”[38]
The Ego, therefore, if it is to be aware of itself, if it is to be self-conscious, must posit itself as acting—i.e., as willing, and as willing freely. This important proposition, which lies at the root of law and morals, may be examined from two sides. We may consider what is necessarily implied or involved in it, and we may consider the conditions under which consciousness of free activity is possible. So far as the first aspect is concerned, the following are Fichte’s results. An intelligence can ascribe to itself free activity only if it posit or assume a world external to itself. But to posit or assume a world external to itself seems to imply an activity prior to the activity exercised upon the object,—seems to imply that the activity of the Ego which is free, shall be at the same time determined by a prior fact. Reconciliation of this contradiction is possible only if the Ego be determined to free self-determination, and if the motive or occasioning cause of this free self-determination be itself a rational, active Ego. The Ego, then, cannot become aware of itself as a free, active being, without at the same time positing the existence of another free and active being. Individuality or personality is conceivable only if there be given a multiplicity of individuals or persons, and individuality is a condition of consciousness of self. Nay, further, the recognition of individuality, which is possible only in a community of free, active intelligences, demands as its conditions the positing of an external means of realising free activity—i.e., of a material organism or body. The sense world thus receives a deeper interpretation as the common ground or means of communication between free intelligences. A community of free beings, finally, is only conceivable if each regard himself as standing to the others in a certain relation, which may be called that of right or law. The essence of this relation is the limitation by each of his sphere of free activity, in accordance with the notion of a like sphere of free activity as belonging to others. Rights, as Fichte repeatedly insists, are the conditions of individuality.[39]
From this point the philosophical treatment of jurisprudence takes its start. Rights have been deduced from the very nature of self-consciousness, and not from any ethical principle, and the whole science is treated by Fichte in a strictly systematic fashion, as entirely independent of ethics. In this procedure the ‘Naturrecht’ stands opposed not only to the later developments of his thought, but to the earlier political doctrines of the ‘Contributions;’ and while the work contains much acute analysis of legal notions, it is, as a whole, fanciful and unsatisfactory. Perhaps the most interesting doctrines are the definite rejection of primitive rights as existing beyond the state, the view of the state as essentially an external mechanism for preserving the condition of right in a freely formed community, the notion of an ephorat, or body invested with right of veto on the legislative and executive power, the theory of punishment as purely protective, and the strongly socialist principles for state regulation of property, labour, trade, and money. The ‘Geschlossene Handelsstaat,’ already referred to, is but the natural appendix to the theory of rights in general.
So far, the consideration of the conditions under which the Ego is conscious of itself has been external. The Ego, conscious of self-existence in willing, is necessarily an individual, standing in relation to other individuals. The consciousness of self as willing must be further analysed. But the consciousness of self as willing is identical with the consciousness of self-activity, with the tendency to act in independence of everything external to self, with self-determination. This is the reality which underlies the intellectual intuition previously noted. Were not the Ego absolute tendency to free activity, there would be no Ego and no self-consciousness. The absolute thought of freedom, self-activity as essence of the Ego, appears in consciousness in the correlative form of all knowledge, as subjective,—in which case it is mere freedom; as objective,—in which case it is necessary determination or law. The union of these in the Ego is the consciousness of freedom as law, the categorical imperative or moral law.
Activity, objectively regarded, is impulse or tendency (Trieb). The Ego, as has been already seen, is a system of impulses; its very nature is tendency or impulse. But all tendency of the Ego must at the same time be for the Ego—that is, must be reflectively matter of consciousness to the Ego. A tendency of which we are reflectively conscious is a need or want, and when further determined in reference to a definite object, a desire. Nature—i.e., our nature—as a system of tendencies, has, therefore, one supreme end, satisfaction of desire, pleasure or enjoyment. The Ego, however, is not merely nature, but consciousness of self, and in so far is independent of objects. It is at once tendency towards objects and tendency towards self-activity, realisation of its own independence. The very essence of the real Ego is the constant coexistence in apparent isolation of the two impulses—natural tendency and tendency towards freedom. Such constant coexistence is not to be thought as a state or condition, but as a process. The final end which is posited by the free self-consciousness—viz., absolute self-dependence, independence of nature—is not one to be realised as a finite state, but to be continually approached in an infinite series. “The Ego can never be independent, so long as it remains an Ego; the final end of a rational being lies necessarily in infinity, and is therefore one never to be attained, but continually to be approached.”[40] The vocation of a finite rational being is not to be regarded as one definite thing, but as a constant, infinite series of vocations, to each of which it is imperatively called. “Continuously fulfil thy vocation,” is therefore the practical expression of the moral law. The immediate feeling of the harmony in any case between the natural tendency and the tendency to freedom is conscience.
The moral law, as the expression of the constant tendency of the Ego towards realisation of the idea of self-consciousness, self-activity, self-dependence, is the ultimate certainty, the ground of all knowledge, and of all practical belief. “The supersensible, of which the reflex in us is our world of sense,—this it is which constrains us to ascribe reality even to that reflex,—this is the true thing-in-itself, which lies at the foundation of all the phenomenal; and our belief is concerned, not with the phenomenal, but with its supersensible foundation. My vocation as moral, and whatever is involved in the consciousness thereof, is the one immediate certainty that is given to me as conscious of self,—the one thing which makes me for myself a reality . . . Our world is the sensualised material of our duty . . . What compels us to yield belief in the reality of the world is a moral force the only force that is possible for a free being.”[41]
Thus, as the series of acts by which the theoretical Ego realised itself closed with the formal consciousness of the independent, thinking, reflecting Ego, so here the series of real acts by which the practical Ego realises itself closes with the consciousness of the infinite law of freedom, of duty. The Ego, as individual, as finite and real being, is at the same time the Ego with the idea of its own infinite vocation and the infinite tendency to realise the same. The problem of the Wissenschaftslehre has been completely solved; the formal determinations with which it started have received their real interpretation.
It is evident that in the completed system, as here conceived, no place is left for those notions which have played so great a part in human thought—the notions of God as a personal, conscious agent, creative and regulative of things. Such interpretation as theology could receive in Wissenschaftslehre was given by Fichte in the essay which led to his removal from the University of Jena.[42]
The absolute end of reason has been seen to be the infinite realisation of the moral law. The world of the senses, contemplated from this point of view, is not a reality in itself, but the necessary means for accomplishing the task of reason. It has its foundation in that moral law in which finite intelligences have also their bond of union. Belief in the reality of the moral order of the universe,—conviction that the morally good will is a free and effective cause in the intelligible system of things,—this, and this only, is belief in God. For a rational being, God is the moral order of the universe,—not an order which has its ground external to itself—not an ordo ordinatus,—but the order which is the ground of all reality, ordo ordinans. To think of this order as object of intelligence is necessarily to bring it under the forms of cognition, to regard it as being, as substance, as person. But such predicates have no validity when applied to the moral order; and even to describe this order as supreme consciousness, intelligence, is but of negative service,—useful as obviating the error of viewing the moral system as a thing, hurtful as tending to inclose in limited notions that which is the ground of all intelligence. The moral order is truly a spiritual order, and in it only our life has reality. All life is its life, and the manifestation of this life is the infinite development of humanity. The life does not exist as a completed fact,—hence the point of view is in no way to be identified with Pantheism or with Spinozism,—but eternally is to be. The individual, finite Ego, in acceptance of his position as a member in this supersensible order, realises his infinite vocation, tends more and more to lose his apparent individuality, and approaches ever more nearly to the idea of infinitude which is the characteristic mark of self-consciousness. In this intelligible moral order, the problem of Wissenschaftslehre finds its final solution; the abstract form of self-consciousness here receives its concrete development and completion.[43]
Notes[edit]
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. pp. 419-518; vol. ii. pp. 323-420.
- ↑ The term Vorstellung is used by Fichte, as indeed by all German writers, in various senses; and the ambiguity attaching to it is undoubtedly one of the main causes of the misunderstanding of his doctrine, as of the Kantian system. Here it is employed simply to denote some form of consciousness—something of which the subject is aware. Nothing is thereby decided as to the mode of existence of the representation. It is not meanwhile to be regarded as a subjective state—i.e., as a modification of the individual, particular Ego.
- ↑ Berkeley, as Fichte rightly notes, is a dogmatist; but some phases of his speculation, and much of the philosophy which has rested itself on Berkeley, may be regarded as idealist. Fichte himself does not, in this reference, adduce Leibnitz as the type of idealism,—and there are certainly elements in Leibnitz which might lead one to class him otherwise.
- ↑ “Versuch einer neuen Darstellung,” ‘Werke,’ vol. i. pp. 528, 529.
- ↑ It is not a little remarkable how slight appears to have been Fichte’s acquaintance with Hume’s writings. Scepticism, as a whole, indeed, plays but a small part in his system of thinking, and is generally dismissed with a species of contempt. Cf. ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 120 n.
- ↑ The double significance of this category is very apparent in the Kantian system.
- ↑ It is much to be regretted that, almost without exception, the best English expositions of Kant restrict themselves to an account of the ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ Nothing but error and confusion can result from this arbitrary limitation. It is much as though one were to treat only the theoretical portion of ‘Wissenschaftslehre,’ and leave untouched the fundamental problems of the practical side. That the Kantian theory appeared in three separate books, is no reason why we should treat it as three separate theories. The ‘Critique of Practical Reason,’ moreover, though simple enough in its details, stands more in need of elucidation and commentary, so far as its principle is concerned, than the ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’
- ↑ ‘Nachgelassene Werke,’ vol. ii. pp. 102-104. See also ‘Leben und Briefwechsel,’ vol. ii. p. 177.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 9. Cf. vol. i. p. 468.
- ↑ Beck’s ‘Einzig-möglicher Standpunckt’ (Riga, 1796), though not written with much skill, is yet one of the best and most instructive commentaries on the ‘Kritik,’ and should be neglected by no student of Kant.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 460.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. pp. 397-399. Cf. vol. v. pp. 333 et seq.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 446.
- ↑ Fichte’s expression, Anschaung der Ich-heit, is more exact, but, I think, untranslatable into English.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. ii. pp. 379, 380.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. ii. p. 382. Cf. ‘Briefwechsel,’ p. 166.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 516. The distinction here taken between Begriff and Idee is, on the whole, Kantian. The passage implies much that can only be made intelligible through the system itself.
- ↑ Expositions of Spinoza are frequently imperfect from laying undue stress on one of these elements. Mr Pollock’s recent very able statement entirely rejects or casts in the shade the first of them. Spinoza is treated throughout as working with the important scientific notion of mutual determination.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 98.
- ↑ In the two “Introductions to Wissenschaftslehre,” in the ‘New Exposition,’ and in the ‘Sonnenklarer Bericht.’ The posthumous “Exposition from the year 1801” (‘Werke,’ vol. ii. pp. 1-162) contains in its first part (§§ 1-29) a most elaborate but excessively complicated and obscure analysis of the same fundamental condition.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. ii. pp. 441, 442. Cf. ‘Werke,’ vol. i. pp. 522, 523, 529.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 269. Cf. ‘Darstellung, a. d. J., 1801, §§ 17, 28, 29; ‘Nachgelassene Werke,’ vol. i. p. 79; vol. ii. pp. 339, 349.
- ↑ The treatment is analytic, inasmuch as we reflectively expound the oppositions contained in a given synthesis; but the act of consciousness through which these oppositions are given and resolved, is not analytic, but a continuous series of synthetic combinations.
- ↑ “Sittenlehre,” ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 91. Cf. ‘Werke,’ vol. i. pp. 253, 266, 301, 464, 474, 492.
- ↑ See note p. 164 above for the significance of analysis as here employed.
- ↑ As above noted, p. 127, Spinoza (or Locke) may be taken as representing the first view, Berkeley or Leibnitz as representing the other.
- ↑ See ‘Werke,’ vol. ii. pp. 400, 401. The whole tract, ‘Sonnenklarer Bericht,’ is an essay on external perception, which might with advantage be compared with our English analyses of the same problem.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 443.
- ↑ Ibid., vol. i. p. 218.
- ↑ This productive imagination, it may be pointed out, is virtually identical with Beck’s original synthetical act. The whole question of productive imagination in the scheme of the Kantian theory of knowledge requires to be more thoroughly worked than has yet been done. Useful contributions to the solution are given by Frohschammer, ‘Ueber die Bedeutung der Einbildungskraft in der Philosophic Kant’s und Spinoza’s, 1879’ (which does not appreciate fully the place of imagination in Spinoza’s scheme); and, more recently, by Mainzer, ‘Die kritische Epoche in der Lehre von der Einbildungskraft aus Hume’s und Kant’s theoretischer Philosophie, 1881.’
- ↑ Cf. ‘Werke,’ vol. ii. pp. 373 et seq., for a more elaborate exposition of this feature of Intuition.
- ↑ The deduction of Space and Time, a remarkable piece of analysis, is carried out in great detail in the “Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen,” ‘Werke,’ vol. i. pp. 391-411.
- ↑ Particularly in the “Sittenlehre” (‘Werke,’ vol. iv.), which is Fichte’s most carefully written work.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 278.
- ↑ See above, p. 50.
- ↑ The general exposition is given in the “Grundlage,” ‘Werke,’ vol. i. pp. 285-328; in the “Naturrecht,” ‘Werke,’ vol. iii. pp. 17-91; in the “Sittenlehre,” ‘Werke,’ vol. iv. pp. 18-156. No work on Fichte’s system with which I am acquainted makes any attempt to connect what is put forward in these three quarters, and the omission is doubtless one great cause of the common misconceptions of his theory. The statement here given is too compressed to do justice to the very elaborate analysis contained in the various writings referred to.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. iii. pp. 20, 21.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. i. p. 301. Cf. vol. i. pp. 297, 314; vol. ii. p. 263; vol. iii. p. 3.
- ↑ See ‘Briefwechsel,’ p. 166, for a compressed statement regarding the relation of individuality to the notion of the pure Ego.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. iv. p. 149.
- ↑ ‘Werke,’ vol. v. pp. 210, 211.
- ↑ See above, pp. 56-64.
- ↑ Cf. the passage already quoted (p. 15), in which the twofold aspect of the Ego as abstract starting-point and concrete end is indicated.